Loving mobile and print: Five key findings from Pew’s new news study

The big takeaway: Americans want their news portable (33% of cell phone users now access news on their devices), personalized (28% of internet users have customized home pages) and participatory (37% of Internet users have contributed to a news story or shared it in some way).

Project director Tom Rosenstiel told me the findings have serious implications for online news business models: “The data suggest that the notion of a primary news source is almost obsolete. People graze. I think it’s increasingly clear that conventional popups and display advertising aren’t going to work.”

The 51-page report is packed with fascinating findings. But here are five that struck me as particularly interesting (emphasis mine):

1. Just because you love to scan headlines on your cell phone, that doesn’t mean you don’t also love ink on your fingers:

While [mobile news consumers] are no more likely than other adults to say they follow the news “all or most of the time,” they utilize a greater number of news platforms. More than half of the on-the-go news consumers (55%) use at least 4 different news platforms on a typlical day. They are 50% more likely than other adults to read the print version of a national newspaper (23% of on-the-go v. 15% all other adults). The only news platform they are less likely than other adults to use on a typical day is their local television news, and this difference is only slight.

2. Get your news only from the Internet? You’re in a tiny minority:

Americans today routinely get their news from multiple sources and a mix of platforms. Nine in ten American adults (92%) get news from multiple platforms on a typical day, with half of those using four to six platforms daily. Fully 59% get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day. Just over a third (38%) rely solely on offline sources, and 2% rely exclusively on the internet for their daily news.

3. Users want to remix your news site:

Some 42% of the internet users who get news online — or 30% of all internet users — say that it is important to them when choosing news sites to be able to customize the news they get at that site. It is fascinating to note that this feature applies equally as much to those who say they prefer to follow specific topics (51% of them like being able to customize news on a site) and those who say they rely on others to keep them abreast of news (52% of them like this feature on a news website). At the same time, disproportionate numbers of those under age 50, blacks, wide-ranging platform users and browsers for online news, and social media users say this is a preference for them on a news website.

4. The devotion to objectivity isn’t as popular outside newsrooms:

Only half [of Americans] say their preference is for objective, straight news: 49% say they prefer getting news from sources that do not have a particular point of view; 31% prefer sources that share their point of view; and 11% say they prefer sources whose point of view differs with theirs. The rest say the don’t know their preference or don’t want to declare it.

5. Local news is nowhere near the top of most people’s news wishlists:

The most popular online news subjects are the weather (followed by 81% of internet news users), national events (73%), health and medicine (66%), business and the economy (64%), international events (62%), and science and technology (60%). Asked what subjects they would like to receive more coverage, 44% said scientific news and discoveries, 41% said religion and spirituality, 39% said health and medicine, 39% said their state government, and 38% said their neighborhood or local community.

Hi Jason — Good point. I went back and took a look at another section of the study on how satisfied consumers are with the current coverage of different topics. When you take into account this extra information, I think my original point about local news becomes more clear. Even taking margin of error into account, more consumers think there is enough local coverage of their community (57% say there is) versus science news (50% say there is enough coverage) or religion news (51% of respondents said there’s enough).